DevOpsML: Towards Modeling DevOps Processes and Platforms

DevOps and Model Driven Engineering (MDE) provide differently skilled IT stakeholders with methodologies and tools for organizing and automating continuous software engineering activities-from development to operations, and using models as key engineering artifacts, respectively. Both DevOps and MDE aim at shortening the development life-cycle, dealing with complexity, and improve software process and product quality. The integration of DevOps and MDE principles and practices in low-code engineering platforms (LCEP) are gaining attention by the research community. However, at the same time, new requirements are upcoming for DevOps and MDE as LCEPs are often used by non-technical users, to deliver fully functional software. This is in particular challenging for current DevOps processes, which are mostly considered on the technological level, and thus, excluding most of the current LCEP users. The systematic use of models and modeling to lowering the learning curve of DevOps processes and platforms seems beneficial to make them also accessible for non-technical users. In this paper, we introduce DevOpsML, a conceptual framework for modeling and combining DevOps processes and platforms. Tools along with their interfaces and capabilities are the building blocks of DevOps platform configurations, which can be mapped to software engineering processes of arbitrary complexity. We show our initial endeavors on DevOpsML and present a research roadmap how to employ the resulting DevOpsML framework for different use cases.